Posts Tagged ‘social networking’

You have your EA program completely wrong!

Let’s start clarifying with a definition: “Employee advocacy” is a term used to describe the exposure that employees generate for brands using their own online assets. While social media is often the main medium for employee advocacy, these “online assets” include email, chat, forums, discussion boards and more.” (Source: Linkhumans).

Going through a large number of post on how to start an Employee Advocacy Program, I found the following recurring elements. Most include some kind of a mission; creating trust and freedom quickly followed by social media policy (of course); a set of advocacy tools; some kind of an incentive plan; company generated and focused content; and finally possibly some training.

The focus of the program is on Reach and KPIs as measurement criteria. Though this might make sense from a company’s point of view, it does not from the advocate’s point of view.

What is really needed to get to advocacy going is “Passion”. Few (or no) programs are addressing this. Let me dig a little deeper on what I mean by passion.

Passion for the company

Passionate employee are those that pay attention to the company’s strategies and tactics. They follow every step the company is taking to be successful. Sometimes they might question these steps. They see their role in that success. They defend their company every time without being asked and not because someone in the company ordered them. Most importantly, they are not motivated by money.

Without that passion there is no employee advocacy.

Passion for the culture

Companies must have a passionate work culture that translates into devotion, recognition and long-term employment. Open communications, honesty are key components that must exist within the company. A lot of the times, you team culture springs to mind. And as the expression goes: there is no I in Team! And yes, EA is about creating trust and freedom!

Without that passion there is no employee advocacy.

Passion for products and services

The next level is that your employees need to be passionate about their products and services. They see how these products make a difference and what their contribution to that success is. It makes them proud!

Without that passion there is no employee advocacy.

Passion for helping

Yet another key element for advocacy is that you give freely without expecting any immediate return or otherwise stated the giver does not specify what should be given in return but rather accepts that the recipient is free might decide to give something at some point. As a giver you are trying to add value to your network and community.

Without that passion there is no employee advocacy.

Passion for social

Employees also have to have a passion for social media. And I do not mean obsessed with constant updates but more about that internal fire to share and contribute without asking the ‘return’ questions. So if they have no or limited social media accounts they will not suddenly create them and start sharing information because you ask them (via a amplification platform using gamification techniques).

Without that passion there is no employee advocacy.

Passion for personal branding

Finally, there must be a need/want of the employee to do personal branding and that using content that is either handed to them or they curated/created themselves. The WIIIFM factor is and must be high and add value to the network of the individual.

And yes, there is an “I” in team when it comes to employee advocacy. Here is the magic formula:

Employee Advocacy = Team + I

Without that passion there is no employee advocacy.

Remember that Passion and authenticity are hard to fake and people see through it easily. Of course, this comes at a cost: the cost of failing and changing direction at some point. That’s okay because it lets you know it is time to move on and follow new passions.

So when you set up an Employee Advocacy program releasethe passion first!

Whether you like it or not sharing content on your LinkedIn company profile will help your company’s visibility and allow its employees to share valuable company approved content via their personal profile. However, most companies and people have no idea what to share. Therefore I have brought together these 50 posts from 33 companies and organisations as a source of inspiration on what to share on LinkedIn. When you take a look at this list, I am convinced you will not be able to say that you have no content to share anymore.

LinkedIn company pages are essential for branding and for building and sustaining a following and community. LinkedIn is providing B2B companies with a unique opportunity to present themselves as thought leaders and generate meaningful conversation about their businesses. Sharing the above content will increase readership, create visibility and encourage employees to share the content in their professional network.

So what are you waiting for to post every day on your LinkedIn company profile?

Though I am not against paying for LinkedIn I believe you should be stretching it first to its limits before you do pay. I find that a lot of people are paying where they shouldn’t or as they are not using the extra functionality. Let me give you some insight into why I think you should not pay…

Additional Filters

I agree with the fact that the advanced search of LinkedIn is very powerful. If and when you are working in a smaller type market (Belgium with 2.3 million members), these extra parameters are of no value.

Tip : just use the keyword search to get better results. You will not be disappointed.

More Search Results

Okay, you can see more than 100 profiles which means that your search is not specific enough. Let’s be honest you do not have the time or even energy to scroll through 30 screens. You are not doing this on Google search so why would you do it on LinkedIn.

Tip: Be more specific in your search criteria.

More saved searches

There is something to be said about that were it not that few people (that I know or have been in my classes) even know about this function. It is very powerful to detect who in your network has changed his/her profile and now falls into your “target audience”.

Tip: set up your 3 saved searches

Do more reference searches

To my knowledge few people are even coming close to using this function. Heck, most of them have not even discovered where this button is. And let’s be real, in my neck of the world people ask you who to contact as reference.

Tip: Get some recommendations and endorsements of your skills. You could add to your summary that you are willing to provide references (if needed).

Inmails

Of course, this is one of the high flyers when it comes to paying for LinkedIn. Is sending emails to someone you do not know really such a good idea or practice? And by-the-way, did you know that you can send an email to anyone for free?

Tip: Just join one of the groups that person belongs to and your email is free!

More Introductions

Yet another one of LinkedIn’s biggest secrets. Like in real life you can be introduced by someone you mutually know. The quality of the network of many LinkedIn members is very good so they can do this type of introductions. Great feature but rarely used. I rarely get a request (which I gladly pass along – try me!) even though I do have a large network. Since this feature is hardly known few use up the 3 introductions.

Tip: Use your monthly 3 free introductions and be open to pass introduction.

See full profiles of 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree contact

Yes, it can be frustrating not to see the details of your 3rd degree contacts. However, these people have a public profile which can be easily found back through a simple google search. All you have to do is enter the First name, initial and company and Google will give you the public LinkedIn profile. Here you will find the full story. Have you ever tried?

Tip: Try a Google Search on one of your 3rd degree contacts.

Who viewed your profile

Yet another top reason to pay for LinkedIn. You can see everyone who visited your profile in the last 90 days. Do you have any idea how many people visit your profile on a daily? I dare to tell me it is over 5 which is what you see when you have a free subscription. And no, you will nog see more from the anonymous people who view your profile.

Are you really waiting for unknown people to send you emails on LinkedIn?

Tip: Just mention you email address in your summary or make visual on your public profile

The gold Badge (Premium)

Well, what a vain person are you?

Tip: Be less vain!

Conclusion

Unless you are a recruiter or salesperson working in a very large community, it makes no sense to pay for LinkedIn. Stretch the free version of LinkedIn to its limits before you decide to pay. Yes, I have recently signed up for a premium account for Sales Navigator. As part of my social selling practice, I need to appraised of its functionality. The jury is out whether this will actually bring me the so much awaited ROI. Will keep you posted on my results!

The end of the year is slowly on the horizon. And with that come numerous competitions for “best in class”. One of these is the Datanews “CIO of the Year” competition.

Sometime ago (august) the list of the top 10 nominees was published. Each of the nominees was selected for having a good vision, strategic insight, leadership qualities and personality. And then is was up to the the public to vote who will be in the top 3! The winner will be crowned on November 20th in Brussels.

I started wondering how these CIO’s would go about promoting their candidacy for the top 3. One great place to do this is social media. Think of the success of #TVVV or #BGT. Since I had some reasearch (blogpost of April 2011) a long while back, I decided to take another look on social media. After all these years I expected the presence to be much improved. But no, it was again (still?) staggering to see their presence is very limited.

LinkedIn

All CIO’s have a reasonable complete profile and good amount of contacts. However, few have discovered the functionality of sharing a Status Update which could be formidable weapon in their quest to become one of the Top 3 CIO’s.

Only one CIO noticed that I visited their profile and wanted to connect. The rest did not even click back. Well I guess who will get my vote.

Twitter

7 out of the 10 do have a twitter account which I think is great. When it comes to tweeting few have masterd the art. They all remain under 300 tweets (all-time) and 50% have not tweeted at all. I just wonder if they know who is following they.

Facebook

Half the CIOs are on facebook. And of those who are, none of them have protected their friends and/or pictures. I would have thought they of all people would know something about privacy.

Google+

CIO’s seem not to missed Google+ completely. I think 3 have discovered it probably by accident but their profile lack content and general information. It is as good as empty. But then again, Google+ is considered to be the desert among social media platforms. Maybe CIO’s will move directly to ello.co?

Other platform

When it comes to leadership one would hope that CIO’s run a blog but unfortunately, I was not able to find one. Neither do they have a slideshare account or YouTube channel. But one could say this is only for marketing.

Conclusion

Even though their companies are using social media heavily, CIO’s themselves still have not discovered Social Media – the cloud applications that outrun any other application domain. It is clear that Social Media will have a minimal bearing on the winning of votes to be among the top 3. This was a sad conclusion on most of the profiles of the 10 CIO’s

There are all kinds of statistics around about when to post where and with what frequency in order to reach as many people as possible. Over the course of the summer, I conducted a survey among my LinkedIn contacts, Twitter followers and Facebook friends to understand their social media behaviour. Here are the results.

Twitter

Check Frequency: 45% check Twitter mulitple times per day. Add another 17% that checks it daily.

Check Peak: The prime moments for checking Twitter seems to be during and after work hours (over 70% for both categories). The morning seems to show the lowest activity and so do breaks.

Post Frequency: There is a wide spread which is linked to the large number of lurkers on Twitter. However, it seems that 43% tweet 1-3/week,. 27% do it between 1 and 3 times per day. Less than 10% tweet more than 5 times per day.

LinkedIn

Check Frequency: The use of LinkedIn for more than HR purposes is driving up the frequency with which people check LinkedIn. With over 35% checking multiple times/day and 29% daily we give LinkedIn a thumbs up. Amazingly enough 2% never visits their profile while the rest checks it once a month.

Check Peak: As can be expected with a “professional” networking platform, most people access it during the work day. An amazing 80% do it during work hours. Breaks, mornings and evenigs do not seem to be so popular. It si considered work.

Post Frequency: From experience I know people do not do many Status Updates on LinkedIn. The survey confirmed this again with 27% never posting and 33% only once a month. Less than 11% post daily on LinkedIn.

Facebook

Check Frequency: As expected over 65% check their Facebook multiple times per day. Adding the 17% of daily checkers and we can conclude we are addicted to Facebook!

Check Peak: Here too, not many surprises except the fact that before breakfast does not do so well. The highest peak lies in the evening after work.

Post Frequency: Since facebook has the highest degree of “lurkers” it is not surprising that weekly (42%) and daily (31%) post are the dominant numbers here.

Google what?

Yet again, Google+ demonstrates its ability to stay under the radar. Even though there are so many accounts (gmail users, android users, picasa users, youtube user, etc.) few people are even aware they have a G+ account. More that 60% never visit the account with another 10% that don’t even know they have such an account.

Conclusion

Though this research did not reveal anything dramatic, it confirms that LinkedIn is the professional tool of choice and tolerated in the workplace; Facebook the lurking tool into our realm of friends and brands; Twitter the platform no one really knows what to think of; and Google+ that special place in the desert!

We all know that Twitter was conceived to exchange information in short message format. But it has evolved to much more. There are Tweetstorms, Tweetchats, Twitterwalls, etc., which are creating a lot of commotion about the usage of Twitter. People are getting disenchanted with the users of these practices but are they really all that bad? Maybe not? And what strategy should follow to counter these negative comments?

Twitterstorms

A Twitter storm is stretching the Twitter term Microblog to become a real (full) Blog. Twitter was certainly not build for this with its 140 character limit. However, some people are splitting up their text and start splitting their story into separate messages. Each item is numbered so that the reader can follow the thread. Of course, your followers are getting a lot messages in a very limited timeframe thus polluting their Twitterstreams. However, with so many people on Twitter, it is great way to spread your story. Will this change how people are using Twitter? Maybe not… Who knows you might even some extra followers, though unlikely.

The biggest danger is that due to fast pace of tweeting, many of your followers might get disenchanted and start unfollowing you.

My thoughts: Personally, I think you have more to lose than to win by creating such as storm. If you have a (long) story to tell, I think you should be using a real blog and use Twitter to direct traffic to your blog.

Tweetchat

A Tweetchat is live moderated Twitter event around a certain topic using a specific hashtag. Tweetchats are planned events which are announced on Twitter and on websites. Typically, there are 5 to 6 questions put forward that will be asked during the course of 1 hour. To participate, all you need to do is tweet during the set times using the designated hashtag. Of course like with a webinar, It’s also possible to just follow the conversation by searching the hashtag without engaging.

One thing you have to remember, is that during a Tweetchat in which you actively participate, you will also create a large number of tweets thus also polluting the streams of your followers. Again this might lead to people unfollowing you. However, if they pick up on the hashtag and discover the great conversation, it could be considered as a good thing.

My thoughts: I have recently joined a number these Tweetchat sessions and it has brought me 3 pieces of value:

Information gathering – much like a webinar you get and can absorb knowledge about a certain topic. People share freely and publicly information. A great place for learning!

Get more relevant followers – everyone on the chat can relate to the topic. So by sharing relevant and valuable information with other members on the chat, you can easily discover new interesting people and increase your twitter followers.

Conclusion and recommendation:

I think you need to think carefully about starting a Twitterstorm or Tweetchat from your personal account. There will big spikes in you twitter activity and we all know that your followers are not waiting for this. Maybe the solution could be that you create a clearly defined account for these types of twitter activities whereby you make sure there is a good connection with your personal account. This way you can participate fully and not disenchant your followers.

Finally, I want to end this post with 3 questions:

What do you think about Tweetchats and storms? And my suggested approach?

What interesting Tweetchats do know and do you participate in? My favorites are: #s4lchat, #HSENTchat #contentmarketing and #HRchatBE (unfortunately stopped in march)

When you use linkedIn we all love the feature “Who has viewed our profile”. Though this is a key feature on LinkedIn and in a social selling approach, it is also a great source of frustration.

But first something else I am wondering about connected to “Who has viewed your profile”. Recently I saw a post that someone who completes their “Summary” get 10x more views on LinkedIn. Watch out there is a catch which I will come to later. For now, no one nor any article can explain me if this is true or why? Of course, I believe you need to complete this section in your profile since it is your evelator pitch. But what the effect is on being found, I do not really get. Well secretly, I do. Anyone (from LinkedIn) care to comment and back it up with proof?

And now for my catches.

LinkedIn is all about networking. And still people decide they want to remain semi-anonymous or anonymous. It is my experience these people are either my competitors or recruiters. I can’t t get my head around the fact they are not open to being identified. I wonder if they go to real life network meetings with a bag over their head or hand you a business card from someone else? Strange! I guess they have a good reason which I fail to understand, but that is my problem and yes, my frustration. Let me tell you I will let you know if I viewed your profile and who knows maybe we can help eachother! That is the true nature of networking and LinkedIn.

But recently I ran across another interesting issue. The count of people who viewed my profile seems to be different depending on the language interface I use. Below is a screenshot of my profile views using the english (342) and dutch (559) interface. Very strange indeed. It seems LinkedIn makes me more popular in NL than EN. And yes, they are the same people. Out goes my trust in LinkedIn statistics! Anyone care to enlighten me?

Let me be clear, I am a LinkedIn addict and believer but sometimes we need to step back to put it all into perspective. Of course, I will continue to use the “who viewed my profile” to reach out to people and conduct business. I love to hear your views and comments!

One of trends for 2013 will be “Amplification”. The times that companies and people rely on asking others to redistribute their posts and messages is over. Just like with email, you as a fan are getting too many messages and notifications (many of you are turning them off) and thus ignoring these requests.

As more and more of the employees are becoming active on social media, companies are realizing that they are low hanging fruit when it comes to brand ambassadorship. They want to enlist them as ambassadors and are setting up awareness sessions in the hope these employees will actually help spread the word. .

Companies are also looking for new ways to get their messages promoted. Help is on the way in form of Social Media Amplification Applications. The concept is simple: Leverage employees, partners, customers and fans to share your company’s social media messages on your behalf. The objective is to drive traffic to websites, campaign or blogs to generate leads.

How does it work?

Step 1: Findamplicationapplication

There are a number of these applications available today. I predict that there will be more coming in 2013. GaggleAMP, SocialSeeder, Spread.US and Socialtoaster are in the forefront today. For more details, see below.

Step 2: Recruit fans

You will invite and recruit fans, influencers and employees to join your distribution community. You might have to implement some form of gamification (2nd trends for 2013) in order for them to join your circle of amplifiers.

Step 3: Create Messages

Create the content you want to get distributed through the community. And make it easy for your amplifiers to distribute it in their social networks

Step 4: Amplication Process

The amplification application will inform by email (or other forms) your community there are messages ready for distribution. The amplifiers then can select which messages they distribute in which social network.

Step 5: Monitor & analyze

As with any campaign, you need to monitor the process, analyze the results and fine-tune your next steps. Continue to engage your community of amplifiers.

Who are some players?

GaggleAMP, US based company, is the social marketing platform that lets companies amplify their social media reach by leveraging individual employees, customers and partners. (source GaggleAMP)

Users can share these messages on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn automatically, by e-mail notification or from the website thus giving the user full control of what is getting shared where. The gamification option makes this tool more engaging.

In addition to the message amplification, GaggleAMP provides a myriad of unique analytics about how the messages perform in the various social media networks including message reach, clicks, comments, Likes, shares, re-tweets and more.

Pricing starts at $25/month for 50 messages shared. There is a 7 day free trail period.

SocialSeeder, a Belgian company, unlocks the power of your true influencers.

As a company tapping into the potential of social media your holy grail is to find and identify super influencers to quickly spread news and create a buzz on new products & services.

SocialSeeder facilitates employees, clients, fans, partners & other influencers to seed the messages you want to bring across via social media and allows to measure the impact in full detail through a personalised dashboard. (Source – SocialSeeder).

SocialSeeder, is focusing on Social Media Campaigns. You start by creating your list of amplifiers (Influencers & Ambassadors). You follow this up with the creation of campaign which will result in an email being created where you ask the amplifiers to distribute via the networks of their choice (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or even email). The user has full control of which message gets distributed where.

A comprehensive number of statistics are available to both track each amplifier and message amplification by platform and hits.

SocialToaster, a US based company, allows an organization to recruit supporters to help automatically create word-of-mouth referrals and traffic through Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. (Source – Socialtoaster).

SocialToaster amplifies corporate messaging on brands’ social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn), proving that there is immense value in social media engagement. Loyal fans of a brand called ‘Super Fans’ are mobilized with an email whenever the brand has blog postings, events, articles, or promotions for them to promote. With just one click, Super Fans share the brand’s content with peers across all of their selected social networking sites. The visibility of the message increases exponentially as the content is shared. (Source Socialtoaster)

Socialtoaster allows you to run in the cloud and on your own servers. Other interesting features are gamification and viral recruitment formulas.

Spread.us,, US based company, is a twitter-only tool that allows you to promote campaigns and blog posts. It enables website readers to automatically share and distribute newly published content from their favorite content or blog on Twitter. (source: Spread.us).

First you enlist the support of your supporters by inviting them. You then create the perfect tweet which will get distributed automatically via their accounts. Then you track the performance of the post through a number of statistics. The biggest drawback of this tool is the lack of control on the user’s side. Opting out is the list only option for the end user to stop tweets being posted through his/her account.

Pricing starts at $0 for up to 5 subscribers. Between 6 to 25 subscribers (fans) you will pay $4/month with variable pricing if fans increase or decrease.

Companies want to pick the low hanging fruit, but when it comes to social media, it seems they are not seeing the ‘low hanging fruit. Many companies are creating corporate social media accounts but fail not only to communicate them to their clients but also their employees. A lot of companies do not mention their social media accounts on their website allthough that is changing.

Companies, especially the marketeers, are struggling to get engaged fans/followers/connections, etc. A lot of effort is put in creative marketing to be able to attract clients and have them become ambassadors. Through these fans/followers they hope to get their messages amplified.

But what about engaging your employees as ambassadors and amplificators. During a series of awareness sessions in different companies, i could not help to see that few people were actually following their company on platforms such as twitter, facebook or linkedin. The main reason being a lack of information and awareness. Companies expect their employees to follow these account automatically. There are a few simple solutions to address this situation and could include:

Social media awareness sessions

Mention all accounts in the social media policy

Training program includes following all company accounts

Email and intranet campaign to increase account awareness

Adding links to intranet and website

How do you measure if you are successful? Why not create an Employee Engagement Index. The number could reflect a ratio such as:

# of employees following corporate accounts divided by total employee count

# of employees that follow corporate accounts divided by the employees on social media (or specific platform)

This number by itself is not so important. It serves as a baseline. Tracking the progression as you undertake social media awareness building is more important. It will provide you with insight of how well you are doing.

The next challenge is get corporate messages amplified by these people. Here too there are several scenario’s. The best of all worlds is that your employees take the initiative to share message by themselves but we all know this is the most difficult route. the WIIFM factor has to big. Alternatively, you could offer tools to re-publish but that is really a bad idea. People want to be in control of what they share with their network. And then there are some tools available (www.gaggleamp.com) that allow users to select what they forward. In any case, the network of your employees is the first step to client engagement and conversation.

Which innovating techniques and tools are you using to use your employees as amplificators and ambassadors?

When you have joined the social media movement, the real work (and fun) starts. I am always astonished that people ask me how much time they should spend on social media. We all know this is an impossible question to answer since everyone has a different number of accounts and a different modus operandi. However, I think we should put the time usage in function of the goal we are trying to achieve using social media.

So, I am beginning to return this question with a few another questions: “How much time do you need to spend on e-mail daily?” or “Does anyone question the time you spend on doing emails to get your job done?” Not! Well eventually social media should follow the same guidelines. However, in order to get started it might be good to create an approach, let’s call it a “social media routine”.

Here is a one I want to share with you. It consists of 3 parts: Reviewing your social media monitoring; reviewing your own accounts and posting content for your target audience; and reading and sharing content from others via your accounts.

Step 1: Review your social media monitoring results

You know people are talking about you in wide sense of the word, so you need to monitor social media. This is true for both you as an individual and for your company.

This can be done via a number of free tools such as Google Alerts (good for content but bad for Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn) or Socialmention – Addictomatic (more focus on social networks but not always accurate). However, when you are serious about monitoring (and you should be), you will need to pay a monthly fee for good results from all platforms. Tracebuzz, Engagor, Attentio, Mentions.net, Meltwater, Radian6 are just a few of the platforms you could use. It important to test drive them to see if they deliver the results you are looking for.

Your daily routine is to check the messages for sentiment and get back to people. Simply put this means: thanking them for positive comments and taking actions to address the negative comments.

Step 2: Review own accounts and post content to your accounts

Though you have already looked at your social media monitoring results, it is important to review all your OWN social media accounts for any comments or posts. These are messages addressed to you. These might or not have shown up in your social media monitoring. Keep in mind that these are people talking to YOU and thus need an answer.

This is also the ideal moment to post new own content for your target audience. This is the “valuable” information you want to share with our network. Depending on the platform you will be posting daily (Twitter and Facebook) to monthly (blogs). Content can take many forms: text, images, video or audio. You can also run polls and post events. Sharing is fun!

Your daily routine will consist of reading the comments, reacting to those comments and posting new content.

The tools you could use vary from the platforms themselves to social media aggregators such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck.

Step 3: Reading and sharing information from others

Social media is full of interesting information waiting to be shared. As I mentioned before some content is created by you but most is really created by others. Sharing content from others can help you create visibility and position you as a valuable resource for your network. This side of social media takes the most time since you will have to do a lot of reading before sharing it with you target audience. This part of social media could take 80% of your time.

There are many ways to share content through your social media accounts. Many platforms have a “SHARE button” but I have found that Bufferapp is a great application that allows you to share information/websites on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn while you are reading the information. Even better, Bufferapp will spread your postings during the day.

So your daily routine should be about finding the websites that contain good complementary content for your target audience, read and share it with that audience.

Finally, what I have explained is not only true for you as an individual but also for a company or organization since you are trying to become a valuable partner and resource for your prospects and clients. Keep in mind that information that is being distributed via company-owned accounts (fan pages on Facebook, company profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter and Youtube accounts) can and should be amplified through employee personal accounts.

Any thoughts? Comments? Best practices you want to share? Feel free to use the comment fields in this blog. I look forward to starting the conversation with you.